Didi could have let Uber die by itself and get the totality of the Chinese market on its own without sacrificing anything. As it stands now, Uber gets shares of Didi when they were going bankrupt. It's like saying "I'm broke now, but I still want your money!". It may not feel fair to some foreign observers who believe China is "big bad, evil!" but it's natural that some Chinese people question the deal- Apple owns part of Didi, now Uber- who's next? "Activist" bean-counter vampire shareholders like Carl Icahn? It would be a big mistake for the Chinese to let people like him get a foothold in China or anywhere near Chinese companies.
> Didi could have let Uber die by itself and get the totality of the Chinese market on its own without sacrificing anything.
The very point of the deal was because both companies were hemorrhaging their investors' money, and neither wanted to sacrifice any more. If that's what the regulators are investigating, then they're doing their job. Two companies collaborating to stop losing money is pretty close to the definitely of a cartel.
This keeps getting framed as a China vs the World thing, as so many things Chinese do, but what really happened here is that two companies, backed by a set of the largest multinational investors in the world, are collaborating to screw the consumer, who this time is the average Chinese user of Didi or Uber.
It's a calculation of: I'm losing X/year, it takes N years for them to die, and they want Y to go away now. Is X*N > Y? If yes, then I'll pay Y to them to go away now.
Between what we hear out of the Western news agencies, various activist groups, hackers and whatnot, the more I hear about China, the more questions I have about what we (the Western public) know about China.
Given China's behaviour towards Western corporations (Google et. al.) which was reported in such a way as can only be interpreted as antitrust, this does seem to be paradoxical. Though, the more I read about Chinese politics the less adds up, much like Western politics. It makes me wonder if everything we're taught about China is fabrication, propaganda, lies, half truths and spin - much the same as our own political system.
The western media makes China out to be less crazy and dysfunctional than it actually is, probably because no one would actually believe them if they reported more on the truth. E.g. China's pollution is much worse than western news story would suggest, it literally is unimaginable to most westerners.
If you want a real perspective on China, move there, or at least read Chinese propaganda directly (chinadaily, globaltimes). The latter is especially useful given how bad it is, and you quickly realize how much scarily closer China is teetering towards a DPRK-style dictatorship than would be apparent just by reading CNN.
I moved from China to US, and I had the exactly same feeling: Chinese media portrait a much consistent image of US leaders, unanimously focus on their words and deeds that are concerned to China. They left the entire other aspects blank, leave me an impression that they probably did reasonable work in other areas.
After moving, I see so many more facts from US media's portrait of US leaders. Actually, they did many many more questionable things other than those concerned China (questionable or not). I was deeply troubled by the fact that the intention to move to a free country to attain the transformation from a dictatorship regime to a free one, is more like a transformation from a worse one to a less worse one.
There are no perfect countries, just less dysfunctional. If you move from DPRK to China, you'll be impressed with the freedom and open information you have.
I think most of our beefs with China is that it was moving in a nice direction before 2008...it was becoming more open, more transparent, a nicer place to live and a nicer country to do business with. Then...after 2008...they seem to have thrown it all in the pooper. It really was heartbreaking.
I'm sure it's horrible in some cities, but I lived in a 4.5M-people city in the South (Kunming) for a year, and its air pollution level was entirely comparable to North American cities of the same size. What are you basing your opinion on? The standards of living of Chinese people are rapidly improving. I'm sure I would be horrified to see how the sausages are made, and I wouldn't bet on its long-term success, but I wouldn't call it dysfunctional.
I agree with GP; the news media makes it sound like a horrible place, but living there felt like living in a developing east-European country. I'm much more worried about India.
True, but I was under the impression that even on the coast, a few cities are _really bad_, but most are ok enough (i.e. polluted, but not worryingly so). Do you have any personal experience there?
I'm there right now, visited Shanghai, Suzhou, Chengdu. In most populous cities you can't see past a few km because of what first appears to be fog in the morning, but then you realize is smog. Tap water is always undrinkable.
Shanghai is bad but still better than Beijing/Hebei on most days. Shenzhen is better than most of northern China on most days. But they still have very few days where the 2.5 ppm is below 100, even if they never have crazy bad 500+ days like northern China. Still ain't suited to much living. The pollution situation is not overstated by the western media, as anyone living in eastern China who isn't a heavily biased wumao can easily attest.
Kunming was much better 15 years ago when I first visited, it is still one of the better cities in China, but it is going downhill quickly. Very sad, actually.
I'm not sure you can say the living standards of the Chinese people are improving when they can no longer go for strolls at night.
If you only read Chinese media, you'll come out with a more grim view of China than if you read western media. For that, western media is actually positively biased, not negatively.
"I'm not sure you can say the living standards of the Chinese people are improving when they can no longer go for strolls at night."
That depends on what's your base comparison. Like comparing with Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Chinese probably have a better living; but of cuz, Chinese cannot go for strolls at night while DPRK people probably can.
> Though, the more I read about Chinese politics the less adds up, much like Western politics. It makes me wonder if everything we're taught about China is fabrication, propaganda, lies, half truths and spin - much the same as our own political system.
Bearing the risk the getting a lot of down votes, I can tell you that there is definitely truth in your statement. And from the comments I read here, I sense that generally HN has a out of proportionally negative attitude towards China related news (Not this story in particular though, WSJ has been fairly neutral. NYT, on the other hand, is the extreme of negativism towards China, for example).
Disclaimer: I grew up in China the first half of my life and immigrated to the U.S. since college. And I read both Chinese/English news media equally and with healthy dose of skepticism.
You can judge the authenticity of a news source by whether or not it is blocked by the GFW. In general, the chinese government doesn't block anything it doesn't feel threatened by, which means there are elements of dangerous truths in their reporting. So WSJ and NYT are both blocked, odd because WSJ at least is heavily pro China, but I guess they are reasonable news sources in China given government action. CNN and Fox News aren't blocked, so I would stay away from them.
No, you simply cannot judge the "authenticity of a news source" by GFW blockage, because by that logic, you are entrusting GFW to be your meter of authenticity - which is absurd.
In fact, GFW has been a lot more sophisticated than a black list of sites, it applies ML / traffic pattern analysis capabilities which makes it even less relevant of "authenticity of a news source". Do a Google search of GFW analysis you will get a lot of details on that.
Chinese gov blocks information it deems dangerous, like financial info via Bloomberg, this is useful information if you want to make wise rather than nationalistic investment decisions. So ya, what the GFW blocks is a useful guide in what you should read.
WSJ is incredibly pro business and doesn't give much care about human rights. They take the capatalist pro business guys point of view in ignoring much of the bad about China to make money.
Again, this goes back to the "fabrication, propaganda, lies, half truths and spin - much the same as our own political system." that I commented originally.
You have almost 12k karma on HN so you are one of the experienced HN readers. I feel strongly that your tinted negatively biased China view has contributed greatly in HN community.
Being living in both China and U.S., one thing I can tell you for sure is that U.S. (being the leader in the free world) is NOT on a moral high ground to criticize other countries given the recent events of racism and bigotry.
My advise for you is that you should go out there, travel the world, living in a different country for many years and look back on your worldviews.
Where did you live in China, how was your parents social status and how old you were when you went to US?
I ask because from your comments it seems that you are seeing China through embellishing glasses that you usually wear when you are too young or "protected" to savour fully the harshness of the real world.
I don't think that China propaganda is in any way comparable to the one from foreign western countries.
At least most of these countries don't kill information freedom with a great China wall...
I lived in in Beijing for 9 years, just moved this month to LA to start a new job...
My tint of China is shared by other long term laowai, and many locals as well. The people most optimistic about China are Chinese that have already left...voted with their feet one way but vote with their mouth in an exact opposite way. This contradiction is pervasive in the Chinese government as well (Xi will send his daughter to Havard while decrying the unsuitability of western education). I guess many Chinese see no hypocracy in this kind of thing, but it drives us crazy.
Who cares about the US, they don't even bother fighting for the moral high ground. China feels like they really need the high ground badly and are also entitled to it (we are strong, but we are also always victims, Vietnam stop making us do bad things!). This just makes the rest of the world very annoyed.
I suggest that you travel the world, go back to China and see it for what it really is. You should also try living in different countries, like Europe. Your worldviews will broaden substantially.
You're just seeing what you want to see. The BBC works just fine in China and it's def pretty anti-China. The way I see it Opinion/Editorial heavy journalism is heavily suppressed. Blogs, things like Medium don't work.
What is seen by locals as the driving force of the censorship is suppressing hysteria/superstition/conspiracy-theories. That kind of stuff would flourish in a society like here. You can see how devastating it is in places like the Middle East.
So yeah they want to suppress things that paint the party in a bad light, but mostly they just don't want anything to get out of control
Why China says it censors (to eliminate porn and dangerous rumors) and what it actually censors (political views opposed to its own) are very telling. You can find plenty of porn and hysteria behind the GFW, but you'll be shut down quickly at the slightest mention of political reform, corruption, or financial info that doesn't fit the gov's narrative.
"You can find plenty of porn and hysteria behind the GFW"
uhhh... what? Are you just making this up? I never come across any of it. Not a single porn site I've tried works. They're pretty thorough in my experience. Haven't seen any mass hysteria, though Reddit surprisingly isn't blocked yet
"but you'll be shut down quickly at the slightest mention of political reform, corruption, or financial info that doesn't fit the gov's narrative"
Again, BBC, with all their uncomfortable information isn't blocked. English Wikipedia (which is over HTTPS, so you can look up any topic you want) isn't blocked (though the Chinese one is unfortunately)
I think you've already made your judgement and are seeing the patterns you want to see
Come on! Porn is pretty pervasive on the Chinese internet, you don't even have to search for it to find it. They are not thorough at all when it comes to domestic sites...its like they don't even care. Also, all of imgur is not blocked, which is mostly porn.
I don't read BBC, but when I last checked some of the BBC sites were blocked on China Unicom Beijing (but the GFW is hardly consistent). They don't block English wiki, but make it unusable sometimes with whatever they are doing with HTTPS (if you use it too much, you get put in a penalty box for a few minutes).
> I think you've already made your judgement and are seeing patterns you want to see
I think you aren't opening your eyes to the true situation. Most foreigners in China figure out after 5 or so years, it really is messed up.
I don't think its really up for much debate that imgur is mostly porn, given that represents the largest volume of tradeable images. You might not see it if you don't go looking for it, but its totally there.
Second, it doesn't even matter, there is plenty of porn on the Chinese internet. You run into it on Baidu for even the most innocent of image web searches.
China is technically (but not exactly in practice, it identifies as nonetheless) a Socialist State where the government has complete control of private enterprise. Regardless of your opinion on China's execution of this model (Market Socialism, vs Croney Capitalism) the national government reserves the right to do what ever it sees fit with companies, when ever it sees fit.
What ever term is used in the press is merely the political narrative framing for this, no so far as any branch/ministry/bureau of the government.
The government department in this story is literally called Anti-monopoly Bureau (反垄断局, part of the Ministry of Commerce). That name is not some spin of the press, it is what's written on their building.
Yes, they've actually been enforcing them since a few years ago, mostly against western companies that have been deemed too successful. It doesn't apply at all to SOEs, of course.
